


baby, it's haunted inside

by burglebezzlement



Category: The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Ghosts, Holiday Lights, Spy Domesticity, in a SoCal kind of way, winter holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21940693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: “Holiday lights. Festive lights.” Morgan’s got that look in her eye, the one that says she’s far off and dreaming of a different world. “We’re going to be that house on the block that everyone slows down to drive past, Audrey. We’re going to be the shining stars.”
Relationships: Morgan Freeman/Audrey Stockton
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	baby, it's haunted inside

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cookinguptales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cookinguptales/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, cookinguptales!
> 
> XTremeHolidays.com is not a real website. Noël Blasters are from the comic strip Foxtrot. Morgan’s obsession with discontinued light strands are a joke, although I’d imagine there’s someone out there hoarding old light colors to sell on eBay.

“We’re doing lights this year,” Morgan announces at breakfast one morning in early December.

“Hmmm?” Audrey looks up from the daily briefing. “Lights?”

“Holiday lights. Festive lights.” Morgan’s got that look in her eye, the one that says she’s far off and dreaming of a different world. “We’re going to be that house on the block that everyone slows down to drive past, Audrey. We’re going to be the shining stars.”

“Will Wendy be okay with that?”

Morgan stops to think for a moment. “As long as we’re not photographed ourselves,” she says. “We’ll be the reclusive couple nobody ever sees, who put up extreme holiday displays in the dead of night.”

Audrey rubs her thumb over her wedding ring. Wendy’s been pretty clear that their cover is boring-suburban-couple. But it’s been three weeks since their last field assignment, and a Morgan without a project is a Morgan at dangerously loose ends.

“Let me know what I can do to help,” Audrey says.

⁂

Audrey gets a call from the credit card fraud department later that afternoon, asking if she authorized the purchase of two thousand dollars of lights from XTremeHolidays.com. Audrey groans and goes to find Morgan.

“Some of these colors are only available from the specialty resellers,” Morgan says. “You think the Glendale Target is going to have Noël Blasters’s discontinued turquoise from 2017? No way. And I had to pay for next-day shipping.”

“Are… are these lights safe?”

“Everything XTremeHolidays.com sells is guaranteed to be UL-listed.” Morgan shuts the lid on her laptop. “You told the credit card people that was us, right? Please tell me you did, Audrey. I had the last three strings of Pomegranate Granita from the 2016 collection in that order. I could make this work without the turquoise, but the whole aesthetic depends on Pomegranate Granita.”

“Yeah,” Audrey admits. “I told them to put the order through.” She knows her wife and she knows that it’s way more likely that a purchase of two grand in holiday lights is Morgan, not some random credit card thief.

⁂

Audrey’s still in bed the next morning when she hears a tapping at her window.

She gets up immediately, reaching for the gun in the hidden holster under the bedside table in one smooth motion as she gets down and out of sight. She’s frantically trying to remember where she put her cell phone when it rings from right beside her. The screen shows a photo of Morgan, looking beautiful and strangely dignified in a white suit and custom-made suspenders on their wedding day. 

Audrey hits accept. “Kind of busy here, Morgan,” she hisses. “I think we have a hostile on the roof.”

“It’s me,” Morgan says. “I’m trapped on the roof.”

“Trapped on the roof?” Audrey re-holsters the gun. “What happened?”

“Ladders happened.”

Audrey decides she doesn’t want to know. She goes to the window. They’ve got alarms and locks on all the windows, even the second-floor ones, and she accidentally sets off one of the alarms instead of disengaging it before she manages to get the window open.

“I hope these lights are worth it,” she says, as Morgan climbs inside. 

“Holiday lights are always worth it.” Morgan dusts herself off. “Hey, do you think we can just leave the upstairs windows open instead of buying another ladder? I can probably hoist myself up to the roof from here.”

⁂

Audrey insists on buying another ladder, and then immediately regrets it when Morgan falls off (“totally the hawk’s fault,” Morgan says, “I thought it was a spy drone and dove for cover”) and sprains an ankle.

Wendy asks Audrey to run a mission in the Valley, cloning a phone from some Yakuza type in town for the holidays. It’s easy enough for Audrey to get a gig on the catering staff for a party he’s going to and accidentally-on-purpose bump into him while passing the bacon-wrapped dates. 

When Audrey gets home, Morgan’s sitting up in the living room, surrounded by an enormous number of strings of lights.

“Can the house handle this many lights?” Audrey asks, dubiously.

“The house!” Morgan waves her arms wildly. “The house is but the smallest portion of my canvas, mon petit.”

“Just make sure the neighbors don’t complain,” Audrey says.

There’s a sudden fizzling noise, and all the lights go out. “Tripped another fuse,” Morgan says, and pulls her crutches out from under a pile of lights.

“Another fuse?” Audrey squints. “Wait, we have fuses? I thought we had breakers.” 

Audrey doesn’t know much about the house. It’s owned under two of their aliases, and Wendy’s team handled getting them set up in it, handled all of the home inspections and mortgages and other stuff, because Morgan and Audrey were on a deep cover assignment in Eastern Europe when the sale went through. But Wendy’s team would have hired a home inspector. Right?

Audrey thinks about what happened to their apartment — shot up and destroyed. Maybe Wendy’s people don’t worry about mundane issues, she thinks. Maybe spies figure houses will get destroyed in shoot-outs before the plumbing can fail.

“We should get the electrical system checked before you put all of these lights up,” Audrey says, following Morgan as she limps over to the kitchen pantry to reveal a hidden electrical panel. 

“Nah. It’s fine.” Morgan waves her hand. “We’ve got a bunch of fuses left from the old owner.”

⁂

Morgan holds a formal unveiling of the lights a few days later. She’s got them all hooked up on a remote switch so she can activate everything while they’re outside, standing on the sidewalk to watch. Even Audrey has to admit it’s fantastic when the palm tree avenue along their front walk lights up, one after another in a rainbow gradient. The house is outlined in red and turquoise and gold, and the star displays on the roof are bright enough that they’re probably visible to planes on approach into LAX.

“We don’t have palm trees,” Audrey says. “How did you decorate palm trees with lights when we have no palm trees?”

“Holiday magic.”

“It’s pretty damn magical.” Audrey puts her arm around Morgan and kisses her, just a peck at first, because they’re in public and PDA in front of a house lit up this bright doesn’t count as keeping a low profile when you’re in the spy game. But then Morgan kisses her back, and the part of Audrey that will always go along with Morgan says _screw it_.

⁂

Audrey hoped that getting the lights up would mean Morgan moving on to a new project. Her ankle’s still healing, so spy hijinks are out for a little while longer, per the orders of Wendy’s official spy doctor, but there are other things she could do.

She should have known better. Morgan’s decided that the display isn’t complete until January. Several more packages from eBay and XTremeHolidays.com show up over the next few days. 

Every night, they go out to watch the house light up together, and Morgan points out all the improvements she made the day before. Sometimes there are no improvements, or no improvements that Audrey can see, but she goes along anyway. Anything that makes Morgan happy makes her happy, too.

⁂

Audrey wakes up to Morgan shaking her.

“There’s someone in the kitchen,” Morgan whispers.

Audrey’s up immediately, her gun in her hand in one smooth motion as she gets out of bed, center low, ready to fight.

“Not a spy-intruder.” Morgan’s on her crutches. “A ghost! A real holiday ghost! He pointed towards the electrical panel and disappeared.”

Audrey does a full sweep of the house, but doesn’t find anyone or anything. “A ghost?”

Morgan grabs her arm. “Look,” she whispers, pointing to a corner of the kitchen.

Audrey can barely see him: an older man, pale and gauzy, filled with a soft light. But he isn’t a trick of the eye — the pounding of her heart tells her that.

“I wish I could get that light effect,” Morgan whispers.

“But why’s he here?” Audrey watches as the ghost points toward the kitchen pantry, and then fades into the darkness.

Morgan looks shifty.

“Morgan. What did you do?”

“…we blew our last fuse last night,” Morgan admits. “And my dad showed me how to short a fuse with a penny. Like, just if you really needed to. But I just added three more light strings today, and I needed to see how they looked. It’s holiday shipping season, Audrey. The Prime guy isn’t going to be here with new fuses until tomorrow.”

“Oh god.” Audrey opens the pantry door. The panel’s sparking. “Turn it off! Shut it all down!”

“I don’t know where the remote is!” Morgan wails. “I dropped it when the ghost appeared!”

“So start unplugging!”

They frantically race around the house, Morgan hopping on her crutches, and manage to get everything unplugged. “We’re calling the electrician tomorrow,” Audrey says, watching the panel. It’s not sparking anymore. That’s a good sign. She hopes.

⁂

The electrician has to be approved by Wendy’s team, so it’s not until tomorrow afternoon that she shows up. “Could have burned your house down,” she says cheerfully, looking at the electrical panel. “We get a lot of house fires this time of year.”

“Can I turn the lights back on?” Morgan asks. 

“Sure! As long as you don’t mind burning your house down.” The electrician shakes her head. “I’d recommend a full panel replacement, maybe some service upgrades. Gonna run you a few thou, but it’ll make things much safer around here.”

“We’ve already spent that much on lights, haven’t we,” Audrey says. “Yeah. Go ahead.” She waves a hand. “And maybe you should look at what Morgan’s got hooked in for holiday lights. Make sure whatever you replace and upgrade can handle it.”

Morgan grins. “Don’t limit the plans to what I’ve got out there right now,” she says. “I have bigger ideas for next year.”

⁂

“I found the ghost,” Morgan says, that evening. The lights outside are all off, and the house feels dark without the multi-color glow of the palm trees on the front walk.

Morgan pulls up an old newspaper article on her laptop. “Having access to all of the databases really helps.”

“You used our official work database connection to look for a ghost?” 

“And I found him.” Morgan passes the laptop over. 

LOCAL MAN CAUSES FIRE WITH CHRISTMAS LIGHTS, Audrey reads. There’s a photo showing their house, bright with an incredible number of lights, and another photo showing minor fire damage. The guy in the picture — she squints. She’s not sure, but he could be the one they saw the night before.

“I bet the ghost was why I had so much bad luck putting the lights up,” Morgan says. 

“You think the ghost called our credit card people?”

“No, but he totally could have made the ladder fall over,” Morgan says. “I bet he caused that hawk to fly by, too.” 

“He was just trying to protect you.”

“Maybe.” Morgan grins and points to the photo of the light display in the article. “But look at that! I’ve got a lot to live up to next year.”

Audrey laughs, and kisses her. Morgan’s interests have gotten them into some sticky spots, but they’ve also gotten them out of some. And Audrey wouldn’t want things any other way.


End file.
